There’s been a few articles this week around the circle jerk of MMA blogdom reviewing the value or lack of value in rating MMA fighters. Interesting arguments placed against ratings are that lower ranked fighters do tend to beat higher ranked fighters on occassion, that top fighters don’t fight each other every other month, and that not everyone is under the same promotional umbrella. I found these ideas, as you might expect by the picture that goes with this article, nothing short of hilarious. It shouldn’t come as any surprise then that the person who wrote the article has no real long term background watching MMA or even any sports at all, but has spent years watching pseudosports instead, because people who have actually watched sports for any given period of time with some seriousness know the problems with rankings, but still understand their necessity. 

Look at the BCS: Teams play 12-13 times a year, at maximum. Depending on the conference you’re in, you may be at a disadvantage playing strong teams or getting TV time, or if one of the non BCS conferences, not even getting a birth into a major bowl. Every year, people bitch about how the top two teams are probably not playing because the odds are with 120 or so teams at Division 1-A that someone will just miss the computer based cut. And in spite of that, its a better system than no system. We weren’t better off without the BCS, we were even more pissed because the #1 team was playing whoever came in 1st over in the ACC due to some arcane qualifying system rather than the #2 team, who would be playing on a different day a thousand miles away against Notre Dame or something. 

The fact is that people rank things because humans like structure. We rank everything: There’s a line of succession based on rank for the event that the President of the US die that’s 16 deep. Music mags are built on nerds penning horrible Top 10s of their favorite token heavy metal music selections to go alongside interviews. Have you seen VH1 lately? The entire Saturday lineup is “I Love Money II” and shows of lists narrated by castoffs from The State.

Of course, this is not to say that rankings, regardless of who does them, are not fullproof: This is a real sport. Whether with 4 oz or 8 oz gloves (as Shooto use), people who are lower ranked people who are higher ranked all the time. It is the nature of an actual, non-predetermined event that those things happen. Only a person who would seem incapable as to understanding actual sports would take issue with it. It isn’t some Kantian fantasy to admit that ranking guys above one another based on results in the past combined with percieved talent is a wholly subjective undertaking, but to state that the idea of creating rankings, especially official ones (something I’ve advocated in the past) is “worthless” is an astonishingly shortsighted statement. 

Perhaps we could just throw out rankings altogether. Maybe we should embrace the idea that what makes for good TV ratings is good for the sport. If we do, what does that say about the future of MMA over the long term? Why should it surprise you that someone like Tony Kornheiser says “Who cares?” to Rampage/Jardine when no one watched it? Going the route of freakshows isn’t what will make the sport of MMA more popular than it was at its apparent crest in December 2006. Nor will it garner more respect from the media at large, something, all due apologies to the “new media bunch”, a wide array of crappy messageboards and Kevin Iole won’t be able to replace. 

In closing, the only way I can sum that up is like this:

“But hey, look: Bonnar/Coleman at UFC 100!”